Stolen Kiss With The Hollywood Starlet. Lauri Robinson

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       Chapter Three

      Shirley lay on the lumpy cot in the room she shared with six other cigarette girls and stared at the calling card. It was shiny, like the pages of a magazine, but harder, stiff and small, just a few inches long and a couple inches wide. And the writing on it was gold.

      Gold.

      She’d never seen a calling card before, but had heard about them. The other girls had said she better not let Mel learn about it. He was the owner of CB’s and would be mad because when a man gives you a calling card, he wants to see you outside of the basement.

      That wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t want to see Walter Russell again. Not inside or outside of the basement.

      Under his name it said The Russell Firm. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but there was also an address and a phone number on the card. A phone was very expensive. Not even the Swaggerts could afford one. They sure as heck didn’t have calling cards, either.

      One of the other girls, Alice, rolled over, and Shirley quickly tucked the card beneath the one and only cover on the bed, a scratchy wool blanket.

      Alice didn’t open her eyes, but she did pull her blanket over her head to block the light shining in through the window.

      It was the middle of the night, but the city, so full of lights, was never dark. The building next door had a big cigarette billboard on top of it, and the lights on the billboard lit up the room all night as brightly as the sun did all day.

      Alice had been tricked into working at Cartwright’s, too; so had Rita and all the other girls sleeping on the cots.

      Shirley pulled her arm out from under the blanket and stared at the calling card again. It was him. The same man who’d almost run her over. She’d felt as if he had run her over tonight when she’d recognized him sitting at the table with a man that was as skinny as a match. The second man at the table not only had hair the color of a carrot, but he looked like one, too. A big one. Wide at the top and skinny on the bottom.

      Walter wasn’t skinny or fat. Just somewhere right smack in the middle. He was nicer to look at than the other two, too. Actually, he was nicer to look at than any other man in the room. Any other man she’d met since arriving in California. Mayhap in her whole life.

      His eyes. There was something about them that made it hard to look away from him. It was as if they were sad or lonely. No—lost. That’s what they looked like. Like he was lost.

      She felt that way herself. Lost. With nowhere to go. All the fancy talking Roy Harrison had done turned out to be nothing but baloney. He’d hoodwinked her, that’s what he’d done. It hadn’t taken long to figure that out, but it had been too late.

      Oh, he’d gotten her an audition where she’d sung her heart out, and had jumped with joy when she’d been given the job. Roy had even given her a fancy dress to wear and had shown her an apartment. Not this one. That one had been a real apartment. With nice furniture and a bathroom complete with tub, right next to the kitchen with a stove and refrigerator. This one, the one she was staying in, only had two rooms, and both of those rooms had nothing but cots in them. This apartment dang near packed in as many people as the Swaggerts’ bunkhouse had during harvest time.

      After all that, him showing her that apartment, giving her that dress and then the audition where she’d sung her heart out, Roy had left. She’d spent that first night in that fancy apartment, dreaming about the days to come. Believing her dream had finally come true, until morning.

      That’s when she’d met Stella.

      Stella took away the dress, gave her the skimpy red dress and hideous white tray, showed her this apartment and then led her downstairs to work.

      Shirley wasn’t about to schlep drinks, and had said so. Also said she was here to sing, and had headed for the door.

      Stella said she could leave right after paying the breach of contract amount.

      Shirley’s stomach had sunk all over again. She had signed a contract, and evidently hadn’t read it closely enough because she hadn’t known about a breach of contract, nor had she known the amount of money that had been listed. That any amount had been listed. She’d had nowhere near that amount in her purse. Not then or now. Weeks later.

      Her options had been to work it off or go to jail.

      Jail.

      So here she was, working off a debt that grew rather than shrank each day.

      Some of the other girls said she had a good chance of being discovered here. Rita claimed lots of famous people came to the basement. Stars and producers, radio jockeys and singers. She took that to heart the first night, but soon thereafter figured out no one visiting the basement was looking for a singer.